visual-studio-2010

My day 2 began with Alex running through a cavalcade of improvements in Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4. These have been covered in great detail all over the place, but it is still nice to have them presented and demonstrated live allowing for feedback and questions.

Alex focussed on JavaScript and deployment general tips, along with touching on other areas.

I won’t cover off all the tips and tricks that Alex covered here, I’ll just link off to a good resource which is Scott Gu’sseries on this.

This was a great session, I hadn’t thought about the possibilities of geolocation to improve application experience. Tatham introduced the concepts and then demonstrated a simple pizza delivery application that tapped into the users current location (with their consent) to pre-seed a location aware list of options. The good news is that Windows 7 has geolocation support built in. We’ve already been using services on devices such as iPhone that use the assisted-gps (A-GPS) to tag things such as tweets with your location, drop a marker on Google maps with your current location and offer directions.

Session 3The future of exposing, visualising and interacting with data on the web.Graham Elliot

In this session OData was introduced in more detail to the REMIX audience. I’m covering off the basics of OData in a series myself so go check that out here.

The most audience pleasing concept demonstrated was the use of the awesome Microsoft Labs – Pivot available at GetPivot.com. It is a visual data interaction tool. To save me from failing to do it justice in a few lines of text, check out this 5 minute TED 2010 video presented by Gary Flake on Pivot.

The second lab I attended was run by Steven Nagy, and was intended to get us configuring Azure AppFabric but some major hiccups like not having the lab PCs setup with internet access and some other mis-configured components prevented us from following along. None-the-less the lab ended up just being a discussion extension from Day 1s presentation on Azure. Several people had a lot of questions about actual deployment, from SLAs to locations to security.

With the event coming to a close, it was nice to sit back and listen to the talented Shane Morris of Automatic Studio (former MS UX Guy) giving some basic design tips for developers to follow to ensure apps don’t suffer due to lack of professional designer input. There were 2 cool links to colour scheme assisting sites; kuler and Colour Lovers

There was a fair bit of discussion, analysis and reasoning provided by Shane, so I’ll just list out the conclusion slides.

Layout Steps:

Map out the workflow.

List your contents.

Layout elements.

Check grouping.

Presentation Steps:

Remove unnecessary items.

Minimise variation.

Line stuff up.

Space and size components evenly.

Indicate grouping.

Adjust visual weight.

Final Summary
All-in-all REMIX was a great 2 day event, and for the early bird price of < $200 was a bargain, when you factored in all you can drink coffee, buffet lunches and after party. Having already published my brief summary, all I can say here is that if you have the opportunity to attend REMIX, take it.